


The Syntax of Things

by Jo Robbins (plenilune)



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Community: rt_challenge, Ficlet, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-03-01
Updated: 2008-03-01
Packaged: 2017-10-04 15:19:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/31673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plenilune/pseuds/Jo%20Robbins
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maybe not talking about dying is a talisman, Tonks thinks desperately, and for a moment while she hears the rhythm of his breathing change and his body stir beneath the counterpane she thinks maybe she should reach out and pull the words out of the air and put them back into the dark place she's been keeping them all of this time. Maybe not talking is what keeps them safe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Syntax of Things

   The night is very still and there isn’t even a candle burning but she knows he is awake because his breathing is all wrong for sleep. (Another pattern. Funny how you fall in love with the patterns of a person. She hadn’t realised until she married him that there were any left that she didn’t know as well as the skin of her own palms.) Well, she can’t sleep either. She rolls over onto her elbow. She says, “Remus, are you afraid to die?”

   It hangs there, in the dimness of the room. They haven’t talked about dying yet. It seems like the whole world’s at war, but they don’t talk about dying. Maybe not talking about dying is a talisman, Tonks thinks desperately, and for a moment while she hears the rhythm of his breathing change and his body stir beneath the counterpane she thinks maybe she should reach out and pull the words out of the air and put them back into the dark place she’s been keeping them all of this time. Maybe not talking is what keeps them safe. (Stupid, Tonks, stupid. You’ve never been superstitious like that.)

   Then he lets out a breath and says, “No.” She looks at him. “That’s wrong, isn’t it? I keep feeling as though I ought to be. I feel around for the fear and – there are only blank spots. I suppose I’ve stared my own death in the face long enough that – ” He runs a hand over his face and doesn’t finish.

   “Oh God, Remus,” she says. “I’m terrified. I’m a bloody Auror” (she can’t say was; damn this war!) “and it scares me so much I’m afraid I’ll throw up. I didn’t – always – maybe I didn’t think about it – maybe it’s all just biological – maybe that’s just what pregnancy does, but I don’t want to die at all.”

   Remus says, “I know,” and he holds her. “You, and the – the baby, that’s what I’m afraid of. For.” His sigh ruffles her hair. “This is the part,” he says into her skull, “where I dispense useful advice. I’m afraid I haven’t got any. The whole world’s a bloody mess.”

   “This war’s a bloody mess.” The sickness inside of her will not go away. It seeps, hot, through the cracks of her eyelids, acid-sharp on her face.

   (Once there was a night in the summertime all thick with stars, and oh the way he kissed her eyelids in the starlight, and such a thin, thin sliver of moon barely awake, and she thought, _so. we fit together._, and the stars hummed hummed hummed in her ears when she kissed him, and all the world steadied for a moment as though it had found its way –

   That’s real, anyway, she tells herself, in this bed, head against his shoulder, with tomorrow looming outside the windows with their pale curtains. We’ve had that. It isn’t enough, because nothing is ever enough, she thinks, but it glimmers in her head and maybe she can hold it round her shoulders or roll it out before her – love, filling in the empty spaces.)


End file.
